Mood:
accident proneNow Playing: 'Shutting Off the Water' Dutch boy pokes hole in dike to get water for dishwashing, endangering countryside.
Topic: Off the Wall Speculation
Thanks to mm-buster for this observation. Odd. Very odd.
IBM is shutting down a slew of software and services for their legacy AS/400 software stable on April 30, 2007 with no obvious indication as to what software will be taking its place to bring the legacy systems up to iSeries. This could be nothing although it has the feel of a major shift. I notice some servers of note are down tonight for maintenance and I can't help but wonder and wait.
Of Interest: IBM: Software withdrawal and service discontinuances for April 30, 2007
If you've a mind to poke, here's also a Microsoft anchorage to compare against. Includes discussion on Mono.
Microsoft with Mono
Crossing the Divide
Open source interoperability tools extend .NET applications to other platforms.
by Kathleen Richards
April 2007
One Excerpt Of Interest: Windows World Many corporations use Mono, asserts de Icaza, but have policies against "endorsements" so the information is not available publicly. A notable exception is financial services powerhouse Fiducial, which is running its trading system on Mono. If you're committed to .NET and a Microsoft approach to application development, and you have Linux in your environment, "you should be all over Mono," advises Forrester's Goulde. "Even if you're not using Mono, you should be intimately familiar with it and should have someone in your organization on the mailing lists, as well as the discussions."
Cross-platform development technology has been around for a while, and most corporate environments use multiple platforms, so why isn't it more mainstream? In the .NET world, the short answer is Microsoft.
However, the early innovators all the way to the early majority are willing to take more aggressive risk management positions on these technologies. "The technology itself is very impressive, but the better mousetrap doesn't always win," says Gartner's Driver. "It has got to be delivered to the market in a context that provides low enough business risk to justify how sexy the technology is, and right now the perception of Mono is that it is not quite there yet." He adds that if Mono takes off, the real loser long-term is Java, not Microsoft.
Uhhhh... what if you're hooked through the nose to Microsoft .Net and you DON'T have Linux. Sounds like tough toenails. The clear indications to me are that IBM is retooling their mainframe packages and Microsoft is supposed to introduce some Live offerings, which, according to the nice lady writing the above Microsoft article, .Net works fine with other platforms as long as it's a Linux license from Novell. But, if you do not have Linux, your Microsoft SOA is SOL. Nuff said.
Like I've said elsewhere... there's a large gap in Microsoft's capability portfolio when it comes to actual interconnection and interoperation outside their own intellectual property range.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. - Attributed to the Man Behind the Curtain
